THE FEAST OF THE LANTERNS
Wang Chih was only a poor man, but he had a wife and children to love, and they made him so happy that he would not have changed places with the Emperor himself.
He worked in the fields all day, and at night his wife always had a bowl of rice ready for his supper. And sometimes, for a treat, she made him some bean soup, or gave him a little dish of fried pork.
But they could not afford pork very often; he generally had to be content with rice.
One morning, as he was setting off to his work, his wife sent Han Chung, his son, running after him to ask him to bring home some firewood.
"I shall have to go up into the mountain for it at noon," he said. "Go and bring me my axe, Han Chung."
Han Chung ran for his father's axe, and Ho-Seen-Ko, his little sister, came out of the cottage with him.
"Remember, it is the Feast of Lanterns to-night, father," she said. "Don't fall asleep upon the mountain; we want you to come back and light them for us."
She had a lantern in the shape of a fish, painted red and black and yellow, and Han Chung had got a big round one, all bright crimson, to carry in the procession; and, besides that, there were two large lanterns to be hung outside the cottage door as soon as it grew dark.
Wang Chih was not likely to forget the Feast of Lanterns, for the children had talked of nothing else for a month, and he promised to come home as early as he could.
At noontide, when his fellow-laborers gave up working, and sat down to rest and eat, Wang Chih took his axe and went up the mountain slope to find a small tree he might cut down for fuel.
He walked a long way, and at last saw one growing at the mouth of a cave.
"This will be just the thing," he said to himself. But, before striking the first blow, he peeped into the cave to see if it were empty.
To his surprise, two old men, with long, white beards, were sitting inside playing chess, as quietly as mice, with their eyes fixed on the chessboard.
Wang Chih knew something of chess, and he stepped in and watched them for a few minutes.
"As soon as they look up I can ask them if I may chop down a tree," he said to himself. But they did not look up, and by and by Wang Chih got so interested in the game that he put down his axe, and sat on the floor to watch it better.
The two old men sat cross-legged on the ground, and the chessboard rested on a slab, like a stone table, between them.
On one corner of the slab lay a heap of small brown objects which Wang Chih took at first to be date stones; but after a time the chess-players ate one each, and put one in Wang Chih's mouth, and he found it was not a date stone at all.
It was a delicious kind of sweetmeat, the like of which he had never tasted before; and the strangest thing about it was that it took his hunger and thirst away.
He had been both hungry and thirsty when he came into the cave, as he had not waited to have his mid-day meal with the other field-workers; but now he felt quite comforted and refreshed.
He sat there some time longer, and noticed that as the old men frowned over the chessboard, their beards grew longer and longer, until they swept the floor of the cave, and even found their way out of the door.
"I hope my beard will never grow as quickly," said Wang Chih, as he rose and took up his axe again.
Then one of the old men spoke, for the first time. "Our beards have not grown quickly, young man. How long is it since you came here?"
"About half an hour, I dare say," replied Wang Chih. But as he spoke, the axe crumbled to dust beneath his fingers, and the second chess-player laughed, and pointed to the little brown sweetmeats on the table.
"Half an hour, or half a century—aye, half a thousand years are all alike to him who tastes of these. Go down into your village and see what has happened since you left it."
So Wang Chih went down as quickly as he could from the mountain, and found the fields where he had worked covered with houses, and a busy town where his own little village had been. In vain he looked for his house, his wife, and his children.
There were strange faces everywhere; and although when evening came the Feast of Lanterns was being held once more, there was no Ho-Seen-Ko carrying her red and yellow fish, or Han Chung with his flaming red ball.
At last he found a woman, a very, very old woman, who told him that when she was a tiny girl she remembered her grand-mother saying how, when she was a tiny girl, a poor young man had been spirited away by the Genii of the mountains on the day of the Feast of Lanterns, leaving his wife and little children with only a few handfuls of rice in the house.
"Moreover, if you wait while the procession passes, you will see two children dressed to represent Han Chung and Ho-Seen-Ko, and their mother carrying the empty rice-bowl between them; for this is done every year to remind people to take care of the widow and fatherless," she said. So Wang Chih waited in the street; and in a little while the procession came to an end, and the last three figures in it were a boy and girl, dressed like his own two children, walking on either side of a young woman carrying a rice-bowl. But she was not like his wife in anything but her dress, and the children were not at all like Han Chung and Ho-Seen-Ko; and poor Wang Chih's heart was very heavy as he walked out of the town.
He slept out on the mountain, and early in the morning found his way back to the cave where the two old men were playing chess.
At first they said they could do nothing for him and told him to go away and not disturb them; but Wang Chih would not go, and they found the only way to get rid of him was to give him some really good advice.
"You must go to the White Hare of the Moon, and ask him for a bottle of the elixir of life. If you drink that you will live forever," said one of them.
"But I don't want to live forever," objected Wang Chih. "I wish to go back and live in the days when my wife and children were here."
"Ah, well! For that you must mix the elixir of life with some water out of the sky-dragon's mouth."
"And where is the sky-dragon to be found?" inquired Wang Chih.
"In the sky, of course. You really ask very stupid questions. He lives in a cloud-cave. And when he comes out of it he breathes fire, and sometimes water. If he is breathing fire you will be burned up, but if it is only water, you will easily be able to catch some in a little bottle. What else do you want?"
For Wang Chih still lingered at the mouth of the cave.
"I want a pair of wings to fly with, and a bottle to catch the water in," he replied boldly.
So they gave him a little bottle and before he had time to say "Thank you!" a white crane came sailing past and lighted on the ground close to the cave.
"The crane will take you wherever you like," said the old men. "Go now, and leave us in peace."
So Wang Chih sat on the white crane's back, and was taken up and up through the sky to the cloud-cave where the sky-dragon lived. And the dragon had the head of a camel, the horns of a deer, the eyes of a rabbit, the ears of a cow, and the claws of a hawk.
Besides this, he had whiskers and a beard, and in his beard was a bright pearl.
All these things show that he was a real, genuine dragon, and if you ever meet a dragon who is not exactly like this, you will know he is only a make-believe one.
Wang Chih felt rather frightened when he perceived the cave in the distance, and if it had not been for the thought of seeing his wife again, and his little boy and girl, he would have been glad to turn back.
While he was far away the cloud-cave looked like a dark hole in the midst of a soft woolly mass, such as one sees in the sky on an April day; but as he came nearer he found the cloud was as hard as a rock, and covered with a kind of dry, white grass.
When he got there, he sat down on a tuft of grass near the cave, and considered what he should do next.
The first thing was, of course, to bring the dragon out, and the next to make him breathe water instead of fire.
"I have it!" cried Wang Chih at last; and he nodded his head so many times that the little white crane expected to see it fall off.
He struck a light, and set the grass on fire, and it was so dry that the flames spread all around the entrance to the cave, and made such a smoke and crackling that the sky-dragon put his head out to see what was the matter.
"Ho! Ho!" cried the dragon, when he saw what Wang Chih had done, "I can soon put this to rights." And he breathed once, and the water came out of his nose and mouth in three streams.
But this was not enough to put the fire out. Then he breathed twice, and the water came out in three mighty rivers, and Wang Chih, who had taken care to fill his bottle when the first stream began to flow, sailed away on the white crane's back as fast as he could go, to escape being drowned.
The rivers poured over the cloud rock, until there was not a spark left alight, and rushed down through the sky into the sea below.
Fortunately, the sea lay right underneath the dragon's cave, or he would have done some nice mischief. As it was, the people on the coast looked out across the water toward Japan, and saw three inky-black clouds stretching from the sky into the sea.
"My word! There is a fine rain-storm out at sea!" they said to each other.
But, of course, it was nothing of the kind; it was only the sky-dragon putting out the fire Wang Chih had kindled.
Meanwhile, Wang Chih was on his way to the moon, and when he got there he went straight to the hut where the Hare of the Moon lived, and knocked at the door.
The Hare was busy pounding the drugs which make up the elixir of life; but he left his work, opened the door, and invited Wang Chih to come in.
He was not ugly, like the dragon; his fur was quite white and soft and glossy, and he had lovely, gentle brown eyes.
The Hare of the Moon lives a thousand years, as you know, and when he is five hundred years old he changes his color from brown to white, and becomes, if possible, better tempered and nicer than he was before.
As soon as he heard what Wang Chih wanted, he opened two windows at the back of the hut, and told him to look through each of them in turn.
"Tell me what you see," said the Hare, going back to the table where he was pounding the drugs.
"I can see a great many houses and people," said Wang Chih, "and streets—why, this is the town I was in yesterday, the one which has taken the place of my old village."
Wang Chih stared, and grew more and more puzzled. Here he was up in the moon, and yet he could have thrown a stone into the busy street of the Chinese town below his window.
"How does it come here," he stammered, at last.
"Oh, that is my secret," replied the wise old Hare. "I know how to do a great many things which would surprise you. But the question is, do you want to go back there?"
Wang Chih shook his head.
"Then close the window. It is the window of the Present. And look through the other, which is the window of the Past.
Wang Chih obeyed, and through this window he saw his own dear little village, and his wife, and Han Chung and Ho-Seen-Ko jumping about her as she hung up the colored lanterns outside the door.
"Father won't be in time to light them for us, after all," Han Chung was saying.
Wang Chih turned, and looked eagerly at the White Hare.
"Let me go to them," he said. "I have got a bottle of water from the sky-dragon's mouth, and———"
"That's all right," said the White Hare. "Give it to me."
He opened the bottle, and mixed the contents carefully with a few drops of the elixir of life, which was clear as crystal, and of which each drop shone like a diamond as he poured it in.
"Now, drink this," he said to Wang Chih, "and it will give you the power of living once more in the past, as you desire."
Wang Chih held out his hand, and drank every drop.
The moment he had done so the window grew larger, and he saw some steps leading from it down into the village street.
Thanking the Hare, he rushed through it, and ran toward his own house, arriving in time to take from his wife's hand the taper with which she was about to light the red and yellow lanterns which swung over the door.
"What has kept you so long, father? Where have you been?" asked Han Chung, while little Ho-Seen-Ko wondered why he kissed and embraced them all so eagerly.
But Wang Chih did not tell them his adventures just then; only when darkness fell, and the Feast of Lanterns began, he took his part in it with a merry heart.